UFC 178 was a long time coming for Eddie Alvarez.
It took nearly two years of legal wrangling, followed by wholesale regime change to disentangle the Bellator lightweight champion from his previous place of work. When Alvarez enters the Octagon on Saturday opposite 155-pound mainstay Donald Cerrone, it will probably feel like something close to freedom.
That’s the good news here—that after considerable ugliness and bad feelings all around, Alvarez will finally arrive at the destination he set into his GPS back in October 2012. Perhaps the better news, especially for those of us on the outside looking in, is that he gets the chance to prove he’s really the guy we believed him to be all along.
For Alvarez, nothing short of an impressive victory over Cerrone will do if he means to make his case as one of the best lightweights in the world—that is, if he wants to show that Eddie Alvarez the fighter is in the same league as Eddie Alvarez the idea.
A curious thing happened for the highly touted Philadelphia native while he was playing chicken in court with his Bellator bosses. A lot of people who had probably never really seen him fight decided they were in his corner.
Alvarez made webcam media appearances while his kids played in the background. He seemed like a good guy, and we felt his pain as he talked about the stress and strain of being sued by (and suing) America’s second-largest MMA promoter. We watched him watch precious days and months of his career slip by, when all he wanted was the chance to prove he belonged among the best (and to be paid like it).
Now that he’s here—better late than never, amirite?—it will provide a feel-good moment in a year that sorely needs them.
But the warm and fuzzies end the moment the clock starts ticking.
Alvarez begins his journey as a UFC fighter with a special kind of pressure on his shoulders. There’s some precedent that high-profile Octagon debuts typically end with a whimper rather than a bang. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Saturday’s pay-per-view will be finding out if Alvarez can be the exception to the rule.
Since he began to separate himself from the pack between 2006 and 2008, he’s been the beneficiary of a certain amount of guesswork. Our longstanding theory—with no real evidence besides the visuals to back it up—is that Alvarez is something special.
Because of that notion, his first UFC appearance comes preloaded with great expectations. At 30 years old, he enters the Octagon with an overall record of 25-3 and as much as half a decade left in his athletic prime. He’s risen to near the top of every promotion he’s ever fought for, and his career dossier is littered with recognizable names from around the MMA world.
Back in Bellator, he thrilled us with a pair of classic fights against Michael Chandler, but Alvarez lost one of them, and the organization never had the depth to consistently surround him with other world-class fighters.
We know he has the stuff to trounce a slumping Roger Huerta, an outsized Pat Curran and an outgunned Patricky Freire. We know he really only has one speed—the speed of awesome. We just have no idea what will happen when he meets Cerrone in the UFC.
It will be the ultimate sink-or-swim moment for a guy who paid more than his fair share of dues while just waiting to get his chance in the water.
Cerrone comes in on a tear of his own, with four straight victories and more momentum than he’s enjoyed since crafting a six-fight win streak from 2010 to 2011. He looked like the best version of himself during his recent second-round KO of Jim Miller, and that win seemed to prove he has come into his own as a legitimate contender.
While Cerrone has essentially made the UFC 155-pound division his own personal playground, fighting in the Octagon three times already this year, Alvarez will be dipping his toe in for the first time. Cerrone maintains that he didn’t watch any film to prepare for this fight, via Sherdog.com, and comes into this meeting with his standard devil-may-care flag duly flying.
Oddsmakers say this fight is too close to call. Like a lot of bouts in the Fox-era UFC, it appears to have been booked as much for the fireworks as for what it actually means in the lightweight division.
Whatever happens, it’s going to be fun.
If Alvarez is the guy we suspect him to be, he should be able to win this fight walking away. He should be able to look good against Cerrone and then slide into a title bout (and another crowd-pleaser) against either Anthony Pettis or Gilbert Melendez next spring.
At least, that’s what we think should happen. We don’t really know for sure.
We just know that we’ve all waited a long time for this. Now it’s business time. It’s time to see what kind of talent this guy can really be.
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